The first Beta release of the upcoming Epiphany 3.12 web browser application that’s part of the GNOME desktop environment has been released with many interesting features, several bugfixes, and updated translations.

Epiphany 3.12 Beta 1 revamps the title/location bar, improves the HTML-based overview page, fixes some issues with pop-up windows in multi-process mode, moves the New Tab button to the left side of the navigation toolbar, and repairs the Find toolbar.

WebKitGTK+ 2.3.90 or later is now required when compiling Epiphany 3.12 Beta 1 from sources, the profile migrator will no longer be spawned if it’s not required, several translations have been updated, the source code has been cleaned up, and many other small bugs have been fixed.

This Beta release of the Epiphany 3.12 web browser can be tested as part of the 3.12 Beta 1 release of the GNOME desktop environment, using the JHBuild utility to compile it from sources. The next Beta version will be available for testing at the beginning of March.

You can also download the Epiphany 3.12 Beta 1 source archive right now from Softpedia. We remind everyone that this is an unstable release and it should not be installed on production machines, as it is intended for testing purposes only.